The newly released album Indie Cindy marks the first new music from the Pixies since 1991.

The span is notable, but singer Charles Thompson — better known as Black Francis — says it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The group, a mainstay of the alternative-rock movement of the late 1980s and early ’90s, made its name with landmark albums such as Surfer Rosa (1988) and Doolittle (1989), then broke up in 1992.

The members came back together in 2004 but spent almost all of the ensuing decade touring, playing live shows and gently sidestepping questions about new music. (The Pixies performed in February in Columbus at a sold-out Lifestyle Communities Pavilion concert.)

“The recording part of it took awhile to organize,” said Thompson, who co-founded the Pixies in 1986 in Boston, along with guitarist Joey Santiago, drummer David Lovering and bassist Kim Deal. She left the band last year.

“There were failed sessions, failed rehearsals of new music that happened a couple years ago with all four of us. There were times of out-and-out refusal by one member to participate in any kind of new endeavor. There were times where we felt like it was an agreement among the four people to do it, but not like a strong ‘OK, so we’re going to go in the studio tomorrow’ kind of thing . . . It was just hard to get it all together.”

But eventually, Thompson began working on new material for the band.

“Of course, a writer thinks that everything that comes out of his head is brilliant,” he said. “You need the perspective of the other players.

“We haven’t made a record for 20 years, so you’ve got to dig deep here, come up with something that’s really good,” he said.

Thompson got help in that regard from producer Gil Norton, who had worked with the Pixies on three of their four previous albums, including Doolittle.

He came aboard for the sessions, conducted in Wales in 2012, and helped Thompson weed through “25 or 30 ideas” and come up with 12 songs for the album — they also appear on three separately released EPs — plus a 13th as a bonus track for the recent Record Store Day.

Norton found that the Pixies weren’t the same band he had worked for previously, mainly because of Deal’s departure, which left Thompson, Santiago and Lovering in a bind. Having decided not to replace her in the band, they had to learn to operate as a trio.

“We had to get over the first fear hurdle,” Thompson said, “like, ‘Oh, one of us is gone, so therefore there’s nothing.’

“And then, of course, we found out that that isn’t actually true. There’s a chemistry now that remains between the three of us,” he said. “Some of it’s the same and some of it’s new, because certain things come out more, musically and otherwise, that couldn’t before now.”

That includes Santiago and Lovering singing more than they have in the past. Thompson promises with a laugh, however, that the Pixies’ famous neuroses are still intact and permeate the new music.

“It’s not like we’re three easygoing guys under control, it’s just three weirdos in the room instead of four . . . We’re eccentric musicians, what can I say?”